The Georgia Senate race has emerged as one of the most compelling, with a series of dramatic allegations dogging the Republican challenger, a former football star, as he seeks to unseat the incumbent, a Baptist pastor.
Former football star Herschel Walker was an avid reader in his youth and initially showed little interest in sports, according to Pro Football History. But all that changed in high school when he began to tap into his potential as a formidable athlete, earning the attention of college recruiters nationwide. As a football sensation at the University of Georgia, Walker broke records and in 1982 won the Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to the country’s top college player.
Walker left the University of Georgia after his junior season to play football professionally, including for the Dallas Cowboys and the NY Giants. He retired after the 1997 football season.
Following his illustrious football career, Walker founded two businesses in the food services industry, including opening an eponymous restaurant in Athens, Georgia, before eventually turning his attention to politics.
But his debut campaign has been hit with a series of troubling allegations.
Two women have come forward to claim they had relationships with Walker that resulted in him asking them to have, or paying for, abortions.
The staunchly anti-abortion GOP candidate has also been accused of several troubling incidents dating back several years, including separate claims by his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend that he threatened to shoot them in the head. A police report seen by AP described a 2001 incident in which Walker’s therapist telephoned police to tell them he was “volatile” and frightening his estranged wife at her home. Officers who took cover outside the suburban Dallas mansion later said Walker had been talking about “having a shoot-out with police”.
His campaign dismissed the revelations as “shameful” and criticized the media for publicizing incidents that happened decades ago.
Walker, 60, has been open about his mental health struggles and his diagnosis with Dissociative Identity Disorder, a rare condition in which an individual feels that they have two or more distinct identities.
Senator Raphael Warnock was elected in a January 2021 special election held to fill Georgia’s vacant seat.
He grew up in Savannah public housing as one of 12 brothers and sisters. After earning a bachelor's degree in psychology from Morehouse College he subsequently earned a Ph.D from Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Warnock is a pastor, as was his father. For more than 16 years he has been senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the onetime church of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Warnock’s father, the late Reverend Jonathan Warnock, was a Pentecostal pastor and a World War II veteran. Upon his return to US soil the elder Warnock might have thought America had changed. Being asked to surrender his bus seat to a young White teen while wearing his US Army uniform showed that much had not.
And yet the Warnock home displayed an American flag and portraits of US presidents while he recited the Pledge of Allegiance at church every Sunday, according to a 2020 CNN report.
"My dad loved America," Senator Warnock told the network. "He took the long view. He understood that we were in the process of trying to build a more perfect union. He was not unaware of the contradictions of race.”
“But by the time my sister and I had come along, he had also seen the arc of change in our country, so he knew what was possible," he said.
Warnock, 53, is a self-described “Christian progressive” who is pro-choice, seeks to end mass incarceration and supports funding for police reform. His Invest to Protect bill – which allocated $250 million over five years to equip, train and provide mental health services to local police – unanimously passed the Senate in August.
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